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And Another Thing

Paul Johnson

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

What kind of pyjamas did President Kennedy wear in bed?

When I was a child of four or five my big sisters told me edifying stories about the rise of the British empire, which then occupied a quarter of the earth’s surface. A favourite villain was Tippoo Sahib, Sultan of Mysore, a ‘little monster’ who was son of a ‘big monster’, Hyder Ali. Tippoo was known as ‘Tiger’ (like Stanley Baldwin) and hated Englishmen, and put to death any he captured in fiendish ways. He was finally put down, by the future Duke of Wellington, in the battle of Seringapatam, being killed in the process, leaving behind an immense pile of silver, gold, jewels and toys. Among the last was a mechanical tiger (himself) rending the prostrate body of an Englishman and emitting ferocious growls. It still works and is in the V&A, though the growls have become a bit husky.

More important, however, was Tippoo’s wardrobe, which likewise passed into British hands, and included many sets of pyjamas. These were then unknown in England, though common in the Orient, especially in Turkey, Persia and India, where they were worn at any time of day, not just at night. The word is Urdu and means foot or clothing, and in transliteration can be spelt in over a hundred different ways. (The Americans always spell it pajamas.) Some English officers found the garments convenient for the hot Indian nights, especially if made of cotton, though Wellington himself always stuck to his nightshirt. Gradually the habit spread. Thackeray, born in India, called them peijammahs and Medwin pigammahs. The first Viceroy to wear them was the Earl of Lytton, chiefly to annoy his wife (Lyttons and their spouses always quarrelled). But Curzon, when Viceroy, refused to follow suit and made the article the subject of one of his sayings: ‘Gentlemen never wear pyjamas.’

By then, however, at home in England, the pyjama was fast ousting the nightshirt for male nightwear and — an astonishing thing — was even being worn by certain upper-class ladies, such as Lady Desborough and other female ‘Souls’. Their daughters, known as the ‘Corrupt Coterie’, were pyjama girls to a woman, Lady Diana Cooper setting the pace. Of course, once women began to wear pyjamas, the awesome — dreadful — possibility opened up of pyjama parties. When was the first? The earliest recorded was given in Chicago by a well-known society hostess there, Mrs Edwin Avon, and duly reported in London by a shocked Westminster Gazette. They spread to England during the war, and were a favourite form of entertainment among the ‘Bright Young People’ (see Vile Bodies). No one knew what the girls wore under their pyjamas. As Lady Anchorage darkly and confusedly put it: ‘Pyjamas are an excuse for concealed nudity.’

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